For one full second, the street was completely silent. Then Ione Mulgrew said in the carrying voice she used when the dining room got too loud on a Saturday night, "Well, the Lord has spoken." and she reached under her coat and pulled out a shotgun. Both barrels pointed at Boyd Tull's considerable stomach. Tull stared at it. He had faced down claim jumpers and bar fights and a cattle stampede that took out the east side of the livery.
He had never in his life been pointed at by a woman of nearly 70 with murder in her eyes and a dish towel still tucked in her apron pocket. He found it in this moment considerably more alarming than any of those other things. He did not move. Walt Dunore stepped forward. Abel Lund lurched up on his crutch.
Clara Dunore moved to stand beside her husband, still holding baby Ruth against her shoulder, which nobody would ever be able to fully explain, but nobody would argue with either. And then, from the back of the crowd, from the places where the nervous and the ashamed had been standing, others came forward. The Henderson family from the North Valley, old Mrs. Krauss, whose six-year cough Odessa had finally put right with nothing more than a different tea and an open window. The Peralta brothers, who had spent a Saturday in November helping Walt Dunore fix his south fence when Odessa sent word that Walt's wife was too sick to work and the fence would not hold winter. Two women from the church, whose names Anel barely knew.
the school teacher, the man who ran the hardware store and had once crossed the street to avoid walking near Anel, and had then three months ago spent an afternoon on Anel's porch talking about nothing in particular while waiting for Odessa to finish setting his daughter's broken wrist. People Odessa had touched, people Anel had carried, steadied, held, lifted, and never once asked for anything in return. They stood between him and the guns, all of them afraid, every single one. He could see it in the set of their shoulders. In the way their hands were not quite steady, they had not stopped being afraid of him.
They had simply decided that being afraid of him was less important than being right. Tull looked at the crowd, looked at Ione's shotgun, did the arithmetic a man does when he realizes the numbers have changed while he was not watching. Then he looked at Leland Ashcom. Ashcom was not looking at him. Ashcom was looking at Anel, and something in his face had shifted.
Some careful architecture that had taken 25 years to build, beginning very quietly to come apart. He took one step back, then another. Chains, said Ione Mulgrew. She tossed a key ring toward Abel Lund without looking at him. A long arcing throw across 20 ft of street.
Abel Lund caught it one-handed, 12 years old, on a crutch in the snow. He had been rehearsing that catch in his head since midnight when he heard what they were planning to do to Mr. Branick and he decided with the absolute clarity available only to 12year-olds and saints that this was not going to happen. He hopped forward on his crutch, found the lock on the wrist chains, got the key in on the second try. The chains fell. Anel stood up all the way up, his full height, which the crowd had not seen unshackled, unchained, unddeinished since before the trial.
The rope still hung around his neck, and he reached up and pulled it off like a man takes off a necktie at the end of a long day and dropped it in the snow. He had blood on his forearm from the knife in the mine. soot on his hands from the ashes of his house, rope burn on his neck, and a knee that had been wrong since he fell on the ice somewhere on the mountain in the dark, and he had not stopped to notice until now. He looked at Ione the train, he said. 14 minutes, she said, "Go." He went, not walking, running down the main street of Copper Hollow, past the hardware store and the barber shop and the bank and the church, all the buildings he had spent four years crossing the street to avoid.
the whole crowd parting in front of him like water in front of the prow of a ship because there was no other option. You either got out of the way or you were in the way and the look on his face made the choice very simple. Leland Ashcom saw him coming and ran, which was, Anel would later acknowledge, the smartest decision the man had made in some time. Because Ashcom was a lot of things, but he was not stupid and a man who has spent 25 years planning for every contingency plans also for the contingency in which everything goes wrong. Ashcom had a horse at the rail in front of the bank.
Fast horse be gelding. He was on it and spurring before Anel covered half the block. But his horse was headed east because wherever Ashcom was going, it was away from here. And away from here was east, and east meant the train. The depot came up fast.
A low building, a wooden platform. Steam boiling out of the locomotive at the far end in great white clouds. Two passenger cars, one freight car. Men moving along the platform, loading the last of the mailbags. And on the platform steps, three men with rifles standing in a loose line.